October 12, 2010

Working Socially in Barcelona and the future of EVA

There was an HP marketing event in Barcelona last week for European, Middle Eastern and African journalists, analysts and social media people. I was invited to attend and met a lot of people I hadn't met before - both from within HP as well as people from the storage blogosphere. The event was not exclusive to storage, but covered servers and networking products too - and emphasized HP's vision for doing more work with fewer products, which is the underlying philosophy of HP's Converged Infrastructure (CI).

The social media attendees were given front row seating during the product presentations. I'm sure it seemed a bit odd to the presenters that the first two rows of attendees were often heads-down engaged with the Twittersphere, but that's certainly indicative of the way social technologies are changing marketing. I give the HP marketing team a lot of credit for putting social media front and center during these sessions.

Barcelona is known for its fine restaurants - each of them better than the last - and we certainly ate well. My recommendation is a small restaurant called El Clandestino. Andy Bryant found it on Google and although it perplexed our taxi drivers by being on an almost invisible street on the maps, it was worth the effort.

One of the big questions people had before this event was what would happen to HP's EVA product line after the 3PAR acquisition. The video below, taken at Montjuic on my way out of town (more on that later) discusses that topic.